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She had left it to me to raise Shaw, who was only ten years old at the time.
I’d been concerned when Shaw told me she wanted to become an environmental lawyer. Not the environmental part. As a freelance sustainability expert, I was proud of that part. It was the law part. Shaw was an idealist, an optimist, and I didn’t want a life in law to beat that out of her.
Then, I was as horrified as any parent might be when she told me a year ago that she and Dex had eloped. I knew he loved her and I adored Dex but they were young and I was even more afraid my little sister’s optimistic and idealistic nature would be crushed by a short, failed marriage.
Our concern for Shaw and Dex was one of the reasons Joe and I had bonded. However, each of us had conceded that for two college kids, Shaw and Dex were handling marriage and school fairly well. They had help from Joe. He’d let them move into the apartment above his garage so they didn’t have rent or utility bills to pay. The strain of financial worry was not a factor in their marriage, which surely helped a lot.
I would have helped too if I could, but I was still paying off my student debt.
And Aunt Rachel had moved to Italy as soon as I left for college. She’d left us the house, but it meant I was raising a sixteen-year-old all alone while attending classes and working part-time. Once Shaw started college, Rachel had put the house on the market and I’d had to find an apartment.
I was not a typical twenty-four-year-old.
I was all grown up.
Something passed between Joe and me as we stared into each other’s eyes. Something that made my belly flutter wildly and my skin flush hot. Thankfully, I wasn’t a typical red-head with pale skin that flared pink at any sign of embarrassment. Both Shaw and I got our unusual coloring from my mother, who had red-gold hair, olive skin and green eyes. We were her copies except for our eyes. I had our mother’s eyes while Shaw had our father’s blue eyes. We’d both gotten mom’s height too. I was five ten and Shaw was five eight.
Joe suddenly cleared his throat and wrenched his gaze from mine to his son’s. “It’s hard to believe when they’re acting like that, that they’re married.”
I nodded in agreement. Even if I wasn’t a forty-year-old woman trapped in a twenty-four-year-old’s body, I wasn’t the type to have fun over a kegger. Give me an excellent book or a movie or a quiet bar somewhere over a college party any day of the week.
“I heard you broke up with Nicole.” Ugh. Why? Why was that one of the first things out of my mouth?
Joe flicked me an indecipherable look before taking a sip of his beer. Then, “Yeah. It didn’t work out.”
I wanted to ask why but he was giving off very definite, ‘I don’t want to talk about this’ vibes.
“How are the contracts going for the building in Las Vegas?” I asked instead, referring to the building he wanted to buy to convert into a new garage. It would be his first garage outside of California.
His broad shoulders instantly relaxed at the subject change, and he gestured to his patio lounge chairs near the house where we could chat away from the noise of the music and revelers. When we sat down on the outdoor sofa, I did my best to keep some distance between us. Joe talked about the business for a bit and then reciprocated with, “How’s it going with that idiot at the smoothie company?”
I was stupidly pleased that he remembered my latest job and the VP who had driven me nuts. As a freelance sustainability expert, companies who couldn’t afford to have a full-time employee responsible for sustainability research, hired me to develop new workflows that increased productivity while lowering their carbon footprint. I went in, assessed how their company currently ran, supplied a sustainability evaluation and then advised them about recycling and waste reductions, etc. I loved my job. But sometimes, certain employees within a company wanted me to offer miracle suggestions that allowed them to make as few changes as possible. It just didn’t work that way. The vice president of a California smoothie company I’d recently worked for didn’t understand the need for me to be there. Despite my credentials, including a degree in Environmental Science and Business, he’d treated me as if I was an airhead doing a useless, flaky job.
“Oh, I finished up there two weeks ago. I’m on a new account, working for a national footwear company. The excitement of landing that makes up for the asshole of a VP who treated me like dirt the entire three months I was there and then added insult to injury by having the audacity to ask me out when I was leaving.”
